Former Official Found Slain in Colombia

Pressure mounted Sunday for President Andres Pastrana to break off peace talks with Colombia’s largest group of leftist rebels after soldiers found the body of a prominent former culture minister who was allegedly kidnapped by the guerrillas.

Military chiefs said Consuelo N. Araujo, 62, was shot twice in the head by her captors as troops closed in on the band in a massive rescue operation. Culture minister from July 2000 to January, she was married to Colombia’s inspector general, Edgardo Maya, and was a friend to Nobel literature laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The slaying dealt a severe blow to the peace process between the government and the Marxist-inspired Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Authorities insisted that the FARC was behind Araujo’s killing, and several prominent politicians have called on Pastrana to hold the guerrillas accountable.

Independent presidential candidate Noemi Sanin told reporters Sunday that the government should walk away from the peace table altogether until the FARC can prove it will negotiate in good faith.

“All members of the FARC are responsible for this atrocious crime. They have to pay for it,” she said before entering a meeting of lawmakers and civic leaders convened by the president. “Given these demonstrations of arrogance and cruelty, Colombia has only one path. I propose that the peace process be suspended.”

Speaking briefly to reporters after the meeting, Pastrana said he will continue to study his options.

“I’ve decided to evaluate the peace process in its entirety, component by component, with the certainty that Colombia’s pain and its profound disgust for violence won’t fall into a vacuum,” he said.

Former Foreign Minister Maria Emma Mejia suggested the government give the FARC 30 days to study a recent cease-fire proposal. If no truce can be reached in that time, she said, “I don’t think it would be wise to continue.”

Araujo’s death came at a crucial time in the nation’s three-year peace process. By Saturday, Pastrana must decide whether to extend the term of a military-free zone he handed over to the FARC rebels to get talks started. If he decides to send troops into the Switzerland-size swath of land, negotiations probably will collapse.

The president also will have to weigh the FARC’s defiant decision Saturday to block a politician’s convoy from the rebels’ safe haven.

Front-running presidential candidate Horacio Serpa had planned to lead a caravan of 50 buses into the military-free zone to protest human rights abuses committed there by the rebels. In a gesture that underscored their dominance in the region, FARC fighters turned the candidate and his party back.

Both the rebels and Pastrana have suspended talks in the past, but analysts generally see the negotiations as mutually beneficial. Critics have charged that the FARC has used the safe haven to stockpile arms, train commandos, stage attacks on neighboring communities and hide kidnap victims. Meanwhile, Pastrana has staked his presidency on the peace process and seems determined to pass it on to his successor after elections next May.

“I was elected with one objective. I tried, through all legal and constitutional means available, to consolidate a peace process,” the president said in a rare briefing with foreign journalists last month. “We’re either in peace talks or we’re at war.”

Critics note that even with peace talks, rebel kidnappings and raids have intensified. The Free Country, an anti-kidnapping group, says the FARC was responsible for a third of Colombia’s 3,706 kidnappings last year. The rebels are holding four lawmakers and Araujo’s brother, Fernando Araujo, a former economic development minister.

Consuelo Araujo was kidnapped Sept. 24 when suspected FARC gunmen stopped her car at a rural roadblock outside Valledupar, 420 miles north of Bogota, the capital. Gen. Jose Elias Cardenas, who coordinated military efforts to rescue her, said she was one of 19 people taken at the site by the rebels.

The others apparently escaped during confrontations between the kidnappers and counterinsurgency units in a mountainous region near the Caribbean coast.

Cardenas said Araujo’s body was found at midnight Saturday, dressed in fatigues, in a steep canyon. Several of the people who were abducted with her have identified their captors in military videos taken at a FARC prisoner exchange, he said.

Araujo came into public life in 1967 as the co-founder of Colombia’s festival of vallenato, a folk music form.

Her friend Garcia Marquez has described his book “One Hundred Years of Solitude” as a vallenato lasting 350 pages.